Creating Purpose for Priorities and Performance.

In May, we looked at how to have brilliant performance conversations. In that guide, I shared one of the key things for conversations to be brilliant was clear goals and expectations that flow from a place of purpose.

When you are running a department or team, goals may be identified for you from an organisational strategy but sometimes they come from a focus identified by you or your team.

We can have many brilliant ideas, every month, week, day, or hour but how do we make sure we are choosing to focus on the right things and how can we give the right focus to our team.

This is where purpose comes in.

Hopefully, the organisation goals are completely aligned to the purpose of the organisation but either way, it is important that your team identifies their own sense of purpose, ideally aligned to this.

So, here, we aren’t necessarily talking about a deeply personal purpose, although there is nothing to say that deep personal purpose isn’t going to be achieved, this is about achieving a sense of alignment and focus as a team.

That’s what we are going to focus on in this guide.

We are going to look at how to create purpose so you can clearly identify goals which lead you to your priorities and achieving performance.

Your Activity Sheet will help you step through each of the sections of this guide and help you plan your own activity.

How to identify team purpose.

Let’s first start by outlining why having a sense of purpose matters.

Putting it simply…It’s the reason to be doing something and having meaning to the something you are doing.

Simon Sinek calls this your “why”. Here’s a clip of Simon explaining this and the importance of it.

By creating a sense of meaning and purpose, you go deeper than a task, it’s about connecting with what will have true value (which does not necessarily mean money!) and goes beyond just completing tasks.

I would love to tell you that everyone’s personal purpose can be served by the organisation or work they do. For some people this will be the case, and, for some organisations, people will totally be choosing to be there because of that purpose – finding this alignment is wonderful. But where that isn’t the case, then identifying purpose as a team is about creating an energy and alignment that makes work meaningful.

What you are aiming to achieve here is a focus on success and what that looks like for your team, so that they have a focus for their work, enabling them to perform. Who knows, this could even tap into their personal purpose.

People want to feel meaning in what they do, and that includes work. This is good for their well-being, and it is good for you as a leader because you have a focus and direction for team performance.

Steps to follow to identify your team purpose.

1)    Start by gathering what’s already available.

As I’ve mentioned, hopefully, your organisation already has its purpose defined. This could be referred to as their vision or mission.

If there is little information available, start talking to senior leaders about how they would describe the purpose of the organisation.

Look at the messaging of the organisation, look at the strategy and KPIs – what is it trying to achieve.

2)     Begin conversations with your team.

Explain why you want to undertake this work together. It is important that you do this collectively, so that it is a collective purpose – rather than you deciding or letting your manager tell you what it should be.

By doing this collectively, you have the greatest chance of your purpose having impact. This is a great way to bring your team together.

Start by sharing what you’ve collated about the organisation, set the scene and get them to consider what that means for you as a team.

Some specific questions you might ask to get them thinking.

• What’s needed from us to enable the organisation to succeed and achieve its purpose.

• How can we make the best contribution to the aims of this organisation.

Give them time individually and in smaller groups or sub-teams to start this discovery phase.

3)     Deeply explore.

Once they’ve had some time to reflect and share ideas, bring them back together and explore more deeply.

A good way to do this is to get them to share words or small phrases that talk to the impact they want to have e.g., enable change successfully, inspire, grow, be brave, safe, or brilliant customer outcomes.

You can also consider identifying the things that shouldn’t be part of your impact e.g., reactive, process only or paper driven.

Starting to get clearer about what you are and what you are not will start to narrow the thinking so you can move towards a purpose statement.

You can consider using facilitation techniques to identify 3 to 4 words or statements from what the team have generated. Once you have these key words encourage individuals and smaller groups to reflect and start creating a bank of options that the collective can explore further.

Help the team to have conversations about why certain words or statements are important to them and keep bringing them back to how this means you as a team will contribute towards to wider purpose of the organisation.

You may decide the organisational purpose statement works perfectly for you as a team but don’t be afraid to add your own flair too. What matters is getting to a point of clarity about the impact you will have as a team on the organisation.

4)    Finalise it and reach a consensus.

You’ll probably need a few rounds of discussion and trying out different purpose statements but eventually you will land on something that the majority are totally behind.

Look out for the people who aren’t on board and seek to understand this better but if you have the majority onboard, then go from there. Before finalising your purpose statement, I think there is value in getting feedback and input from key stakeholders. If they don’t recognise or support the intended purpose of the team, then now is the time for this to be discussed.

If these stakeholders have concerns, look to understand these, and explore if there’s a misunderstanding or misalignment of what the organisation needs from you as a team and what you think the organisation should want.

Sense check it – does this team purpose enable you to demonstrate your alignment and support of the organisational purpose or aims whilst energising and engaging your team?

5)     Once it’s agreed – publish it!

This is your team purpose, think about how you want to use it. Will it serve beyond your team or is it going to be something powerful for you all only?

It should form the centre of your team plan and you may want to use it as a motto, I’d recommend that you consider it as your anchor or compass. It is there to steady you and guide you.

6)     Review

You’ll want to keep this under review and set times, probably towards the end of a performance cycle to sense check that the purpose remains the right one and ensure it is staying connected to that of the organisation. If there are any major changes with the organisation, then this is also a good time to review your purpose as a team.

There are many ways that you can use purpose for decision making and we are going to explore this next.

Now that you have your purpose identified, you can use it to give meaning to the work that you are doing or will do. From your purpose, you can now identify your goals and priorities.

Goals and priorities.

This is now about using your purpose to determine the work that you need to do. Using it to set your priorities as a team will flow into your team performance requirements.

Ideally, aim to get clear on your team purpose ahead of the annual strategic view. This way you should be able to influence the work that your team will do, rather than waiting for the organisation to tell you.

It may be that the organisation does have specific asks of you as a team – this will hopefully be aligned to purpose based on the work you’ve done, or you’ll be able to start identifying goals as a team based on your purpose.

Let me provide an example:

You’ve set a team purpose of:

“Our purpose is to enable those we partner to make great decisions, whilst empowering them to push the boundaries, so we delight our colleagues and customers.”

This aligns to the organisational purpose of:

“We’ll amaze our stakeholders and shareholders by delighting our colleagues and customers”.

There is a strategic priority that has been set of:

“Good financial governance whilst delighting our colleagues and customers”.

The goals here for you then, based on this organisation priority and your purpose may be:

“To develop a framework for decision making that ensures good financial governance with freedoms to delight.”

By identifying a goal like this, you are identifying meaningful work – work that supports the organisational priorities whilst also achieving the purpose your team.

If this is a period where your team isn’t front and centre to strategic priorities that gives you a bit more freedom to step back, consider the overall organisational priorities and your team purpose and ask the question:

• What should we be doing to best serve our purpose and the organisational purpose?

Like the purpose setting activity, you’ve done with the team, you can now do this with the goals.

Again, you must look to what the organisation is saying it needs as a starting point and a priority. But where you have space and resources, what else should you be working on to serve the purpose?

This type of brainstorming is about getting all the ideas out – it is not making a commitment to do them all!

But understanding where the team feel value can be gained is important. This is where you can start tapping into personal purpose but also personal or sub-team motivations.

It might not be pressing priorities for the wider organisation, but it may be there is huge value and if it isn’t negatively impacting on others – why not include or at least consider them for your team plan.

Narrow the team goals to a manageable size. I can’t really give you a number here as it really depends on the size of your team and how diverse in disciplines it is. The team should be able to tell you if they think the number and scale of the goals is manageable.

You may want to identify priority goals – the goals that come first, no matter what and then supporting goals – those you will work on when there is capacity or because there is a specific specialism.

Now you are getting into a place of having a clear purpose as a team and goals, perhaps prioritised and supporting ones. From here you can now align individuals to this purpose and these goals.

As with setting your purpose – getting stakeholders and your manager engaged here is critical to ensure that there is agreement, and you will be supported with what the goals and priority work is for your team.

Connect the purpose and priorities with your ‘how’.

Alongside the goals and priorities – it’s important that you work with the team on establishing your ‘How’ or your ways of working. This connects the purpose and priorities by agreeing on the way you are going to approach and navigate successfully serving your purpose.

Here are a few questions to help you get the team thinking about your ways of working:

• How are we going to work well together?

• How are we going to support each other?

• How are we going to stay aligned to your purpose and priorities?

• How will we handle diversions?

This part can be work on alongside the goals and priorities work and it will help to give a focus for the behaviours of the team but also how to handle certain challenges – such as diversions.

What I mean by diversions is anything that either doesn’t serve your purpose or is not part of your agreed priorities and milestones.

It may be that it is an ask that serves the purpose but isn’t as much of a priority as something else that is already in plan. It may be that it is more of a priority and has presented itself since the plan was created – this is about getting the team to understand when they may be being diverted and agree on how to act and handle this when it happens.

By setting out some principles for your behaviours and ways of working as a team or your ‘how’ you are identifying a common way to serve your purpose but also stay focused on priorities. To help you prepare for that you may want to revisit a previous Leadership Guide: Building the Foundations for Brilliant Conversations.

Achieving performance by having purpose and priorities.

If what you are doing or being asked to do, does not align with our purpose or the goals we’ve identified – we must discuss why we are doing it and explain why this will be a no, for now.

There are always going to be times when you might have to do something beyond what you’ve set out to but by having no goals or no purpose it makes it very difficult to make decisions and have boundaries on workloads.

It may be that the ask would serve your stated (or the organisation’s) purpose, however, it is not part of achieving the goals that have been identified. You’ll probably agree that it is an important piece of work, but it won’t be getting done this time, unless you can agree to switch out another goal or priority.

We reach overwhelm when there is too much, and we are unable to make decisions about what matters most. By getting clear on your purpose and goals will help to minimise negative impacts of this.

Beyond the decision-making aspect – this is where you can identify individual contributions to the goals. This is perhaps something you can do at the same time as the goal and priority setting work.

• What will my contribution be to the success of this goal?

It may be that there are sub-team answers to this that then become individual and specific performance requirements/deliverables.

This is where we will see the flow and connection.

They should all connect and be connected through the How.

If they don’t – that’s where the question has to go back to – why we are being asked to do this and as the leader of that team or department, you can then make the case for why it shouldn’t be happening now or agreeing other changes.

By having these things in place, you are creating a collective purpose, direction, and view for your team. It means you can understand collectively what the priorities are and how additional asks can be discussed and managed.

By having this collective view of purpose, priorities and focus for performance you make it easier to review progress together, identify support requirements together and celebrate together. This brings your team, together.

Ask yourself where you are with having a Team Purpose and if you have clear Goals and Priorities for the team to enable individual and collective Performance. If this is an area that you recognise you want to focus on more, then keep reviewing this Leadership Guide and make use of your Activity Sheet to make progress here.

If it is an area you are struggling with or need some extra support, talk to your own leader, or your colleagues in the Organisational Development team, or please get in touch with me via LinkedIn or email me at anwen@purpleskyconsulting.co.uk.